Yet
by Tolakasa
Summary: Futurefic. The hunt gets in your blood.


**Yet**

It wasn't supposed to be like this, you know. Hiding from my family every night until I'm drunk enough to go home and pretend I'm a good husband, a good Daddy. It wasn't supposed to be like this at _all_.

I guess at some point, the hunt just got in my blood. Like a disease. No, like antibodies to a virus; once you've had an illness, that trace is always there. Never goes away.

It's not like we were raised to do anything else. It was all we ever knew. I could shoot any gun that wasn't taller than I was before I could tie my shoes without help.

We hunted. It was what we did. The job. The family business. You could say it was what held our fucked-up little family together. Hunting, and my brother.

Thing is, I love my brother. Really. We're as close as two straight brothers can possibly be. Hell, used to be, people mistook us for a couple. I lost count of all the times we had to insist to someone that we weren't gay.

They believed us maybe twice.

It got to be a joke. We didn't have a lot of things to laugh about back then, especially after Dad died. Demon wars, ghosts, people dying all around us—we took what we could find. We had to. We would have broken otherwise. Way things turned out, if we'd broken, the world would've gone to hell.

Yes, I mean that literally. Don't argue.

But then we won. And the hunt didn't end.

I knew he'd never quit. Not my brother. Not as long as I was still willing to hunt. And I saw it in his eyes. The stress, the injuries, the worry, all that, it was killing him. It was too much. This was all we'd done, our entire lifetimes, he didn't know any different, and it was just too damned much.

Everyone has a breaking point.

So. I quit first. When I saw that the idiot was going to walk away from a woman he loved just to keep an eye on me, I found a reason for us to quit. I pretended an injury was worse than it was. Hell, I even limped for three months. By the time he noticed I was walking normally again, my niece was well on her way and there was no way he was going to leave a child behind. Not my brother. Not after our childhoods.

We tried normal. Yeah, I said _we_. Even then, we couldn't seem to separate. Our first real jobs? At the same place. My first place? I rented their basement for awhile, until the first baby arrived, and then I learned a hard lesson about the hours babies keep and I got an apartment of my own, a couple of blocks away.

I started dating. More by accident than anything else. I got to baby-sit when my sister-in-law's mom got sick and they had to run off to Denver. Apparently, nothing attracts women like toddlers, especially when the guy carrying the toddler isn't wearing a wedding ring.

Eventually, I got married. Because they all expected me to. Because she loved me and I couldn't stand to hurt her. God help me, I tried. I tried to love her. I tried with everything I had, but it just wasn't enough. You can't force love. Or I'm too scarred to love another woman, after—

Anyway. Result's the same.

I don't know if he suspects. I hope he doesn't. Because that might kill me. I _know_ it would kill him. He'd blame himself. He has a guilt complex the size of—

My wife? She knows, I think. But she won't say anything. Not to me, not to him. She still loves me. She still wants to make it work, even though there's nothing _to_ make work. Hell, maybe she just wants to keep me around for the sake of the kids.

Kids? Yeah, we've got two. Twins. Here, have a picture.

I love them. I do. It's just— Now I understand my dad. Better than I ever wanted to. Because no matter how much I love them, there's still all that shit out there in the dark.

Out there in the dark. That's how my brother used to say it. And one day... One day that disease is going to flare up and instead of going home after I leave here, I'm just going to vanish into the dark, hunting again. I'll hate myself for it, don't get me wrong, I'll hate myself every day of my life, but I'll still do it.

And you know what the worst part of it is? The part that I keep trying to drown in all this beer? The only one I'm worried about is my brother. Not my wife, not my kids. My _brother_.

Yeah, man, I don't need you telling me what a worthless asshole I am. I see the picture. I get your point. You think you're telling me anything I don't already know?

Their names? The boy's John. For my dad. Hated the bastard sometimes, but I understand him better now. It was the least I could do. The girl's Deanna. Named for her uncle. He damned near cried when I told him. And he says _I'm_ over-sensitive.

Hell, he's a better father to them than I ever will be. Same way he was with me.

No. Tonight's not the night. Tonight I still care. I'll go home, check the salt lines and the charms, take a shower, kiss my wife before I'm too sober to remember that she'll never be who I want her to be, go to sleep. And I'll dream about people who are long gone and the things that killed them, and I'll see the people that still die because we're not out there, and...

No. Not tonight.

Not yet.

**_the end_**


End file.
